Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

Is there anything harder than dealing with newborn sleep? In this episode, Kayla and Carianna commiserate about their experiences with their newborns. Then Carianna shares the top 5 things you need to know about your newborn and how their sleep works. These tips will help you start off with your newborn on the right foot!

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Episode 12: Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep Hey guys it's Carianna and before you listen to this episode I did want to make a disclaimer. In this episode, Kayla and I share candidly about our newborn sleep journey, as well as sharing newborn sleep tips. And so I felt it was really important to let you know we share some unsafe sleep practices that we ourselves did. I think it's important for us to be open and honest about things we have done, but I also do not want there to be any confusion about what is considered safe, and I am a big advocate for safe sleep so in the show notes I'm going to be linking a blog I have written called Safe Sleep basics that really lines out the basics you need to know. And what I want to leave you with, are following the ABCs, those are the best preventative measures when it comes to safe sleep and to reducing things like SIDS or accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed, any kind of sleep related deaths so A is we always want your child to be sleeping alone in their own space so not with other adults or with siblings or with pads, we want them to have their own space. B is for back so we want to be placing your newborn on their back to sleep and we want them to sleep there until they're able to roll on their own. And then C is for crib or bassinet or play yard or pack and play. Those are the only safety approved sleep spaces for your little ones so we do not want them sleeping on adult mattresses on couches in rack and plays in swings in DockAtot. We don't want any of that stuff because those spaces are not considered safe, and they do increase the risk of a sleep related death, or of SIDS happening so I just want to lead with that disclaimer I hope you guys enjoy the episode. And like I said we really just wanted to be open and honest about our own experiences, but I also want to make sure that I am spreading safe sleep information for you so you can make educated decisions for your family.

Hey mama. This is Carianna and Kayla to best friend moms and your co host asleep talking moms, we know that tackling sleep issues can feel overwhelming and confusing, so we are here to provide you with practical sleep, advice, we want you to walk away from each episode with information, you can actually use. Let's dive in and talk sleep. Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

Welcome guys today in our episode we are going to talk about newborn sleep, and, oh man, newborn sleep is just a whole other beast, and so Kayla and I, we want to first commiserate with you a little and share some of our own newborn sleep, stories, and kind of what we went through, and then I want to also leave you with, kind of my top five tips for things you can do to maximize your newborn sleep, we're not going to be expecting great things from our newborns as far as sleep is concerned, but there are absolutely things we can do to help them along, and to just help them sleep as good as they're able to in that newborn stage. So, you know, real quick, I would just share when I had my oldest seven and a half years ago, which is crazy to say, I've seen that isn't that crazy, I feel so old and he's getting so old. Oh my goodness, but I just had no, I had no frame of reference for newborn sleep I had done, zero reading or studying up on what was appropriate for newborn sleep, and I just remember coming home from the hospital and thinking that I was going to be able to just set him in his crib, he was going to go to sleep, he was going to sleep, great, because I loved sleep so I thought okay i love sleep, he's gonna love sleep too. And that is, you know, not at all what happened. So I was shocked and I was just, you were really just playing catch up for the next couple months we were in survival mode, just doing whatever we could, and I'm sure as we kind of talk about our own newborn sleep experiences, we're going to probably be sharing some of the unsafe things that we did so, I just want to maybe lead with this disclaimer too that safe sleep happens on a flat firm surface like a crib or bassinet or a pack and play that we don't want to be having kids sleep in poppies, or swings or car seats or DockAtot or rockin plays or anything like that. But we also want to be real with you and share our own experience. So, you know, not gonna, not gonna lie about the things that we did because we are desperate and we understand that when parents are desperate sometimes they do desperate things. So absolutely, Kayla will you share a little about Atlas, when he was born. ls is, he's almost for next month. Oh, and you may be able to hear him in the background. He's playing with playdough. So everyone say hi to Ellis. Um, so I didn't really know what to expect as a new mom, nobody kinds of nobody tells you, lots of things. So, I had no idea what I was up against, but Alice was kind of a special case anyways because he came out of the gate and he had really really awful reflux like projectile was very uncomfortable. He was a very very fussy baby. Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

And we got to a place where he was only sleeping in our arms, and so my husband and I would take turns on the couch. For the first three months of his life.

We were exhausted. I'm sorry I'm interrupting you, when I came, visited, I don't remember how old he was when I came in, stayed. He was so little, was he just like a couple weeks, or was he was just a couple of weeks and you slept with him the first shift. Yeah, I took a shift on the couch. I don't remember what I think I was watching like the office, and I took like the first hours or so holding him, and I wish we were so grateful because we have not slept in the same bed since we brought home.

But yeah, we were, I was probably like, I would say I know that they make you fill out those, those forms at the doctor's office, but I would definitely say that I was like an undiagnosed postpartum depression because I was exhausted all the time, I didn't resent him, but I was mad that like so many things were different. And I think that honestly I think that some of the reason behind that, aside from, you know raging hormones, all of that stuff was the fact that I was so exhausted, and you get to a place where even the smallest thing is such a big deal when you're exhausted.

And so we were sleeping with him on the couch, we were taking turns, I was breastfeeding I was pumping, and I know a lot of you guys have been here too, it was just hard.

So I was so grateful once he turned four months, we had kind of a rocky start, we did, let him sleep in the rock and play.

I will say though that it was supervised, because I was fearful of SIDS and all of those things that new moms are.

And then, I'm Ray came, my second one. And he was a sleeper. He was pretty good. We had a couple of rocky things with eating breastfeeding, but other than that he was great we could set them down in the crib, and he would go to sleep, for you know, 45 minutes or however long newborns do and then he would wake up and we do the whole barely awake thing and then he'd sleep again.

And it was good. Yeah, that's so nice that you, you know after you had such a rough experience with your first, but then your second was much smoother, that's awesome.

Yes and you know, well now everybody's gonna know my second one was surprised.

And, like I had talked to Carrie and many, many times saying, oh my gosh, could you imagine doing the newborn stage again like can you imagine that and then I'm not even kidding you, it was probably a couple weeks after we had that conversation. And I was just like, well, guess I'm doing it again. Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

Yes, but he made our family complete so he did this year. Yes, me too and it's, uh yeah I totally I mean I remember that call when you told me you were pregnant with her then you were just kind of like I was done, like, I get back to this mental space of starting over with a brand new baby, but I'm so glad that I'm really is here and is a part of your family. Yes, yeah. Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

And definitely glad that that you know the second time around you kind of know what to expect. I had already been through a very very bad sleeping experience so chances are it probably couldn't have been much worse.

And so I was just with the knowledge that I had gotten from you.

And just the knowledge of being a second parent and knowing what to expect. I feel like it went so much easier.

Yeah, yeah. And when my second was born Campbell he's five now, when he was born, I definitely, I knew more about sleep I still felt a little clueless about newborns sleep, to an extent. And I really just, I was not in a place to really even work on his sleep when he was a newborn, you know because I very much believe there are gradual simple things that we can be doing and practicing from early on, but if you don't feel like you have the mental energy to do that, you know, sometimes you just don't, don't feel like that and that's really how I felt with him, I honestly, when I had my first son, I was, I went back to work. It's a six week six weeks I was working full time I was working split shifts. So then when Campbell came, I had already just left my job, a couple months before and I naively thought okay this is going to be so much easier this time around because I'm not going to be struggling to pump enough, and breastfeeding is going to be way smoother, and if I'm exhausted it won't matter because I'm not going to work. Again I was naive, and I still you know I struggled a lot with things I struggled with breastfeeding, even though I was with him 24 Seven. Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

I was still exhausted and not happy about it, even though I didn't have to go to work, doesn't mean you're not working all day trying to keep two humans alive, you know, and yourself yeah myself. Yes, and then I just totally underestimated what it would be like to have a two year old and a newborn home and what all that would entail, you know. Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

So yeah, we, we struggled with camp sleep I think probably if I'm remembering correctly his naps were okay, but at night, honestly I got to a point where we just started co sleeping, every night and we just kind of stayed stuck in that pattern until four months and then I sleep trained him so. Not something that if I had a third child, I would want to do things differently this time but yeah that's kind of where we ended up and newborn sleep is just hard. It's hard. So if you're in the newborn sleep stage and you're listening to this or if you're gearing up for it. We're not wanting to scare you, but we also like we very much felt like we did not know how hard it would be beforehand, and we wish we had been warmed, is that, is that right Kayla. Yes, and I mean, just also I mean, for the most part of it that's like you don't know until you're in it, because we can tell you like, you know, You're probably going to be really, really, really tired if you have another kid, you're never going to feel like you're spending enough time with one of them, and you're going through all these hormonal changes and you're bleeding more than anybody ever told you that you were people eating and all of these things and it's hard guys it's hard but if anything we can also tell you that there is another side of it, and you get through it.

And with these five tips that Cariann is going to talk about there's things that you can do to set your newborn up to be ready to sleep train at that four month mark, yes, yes, absolutely, and I will say to that, you know I have a newborn sleep course, and I have many families not every family because this happy every family's experiment experience, but I have many families that go through that course and that implement these very gradual things from the very beginning. And don't ever have to sleep train, because it's just been a gradual part of their little one's life, and I think Kayla that probably lines up a little more with with your experience with eimeria like you guys were just able to set him down earlier so you didn't have a big like sleep training week where you had to sleep train him it just kind of naturally happened as you practiced, yes yeah and we I mean, like I said we were really lucky he was a sleeper. Okay so let's hop into the five things. The first thing that I really want you to know about your newborn sleep, is that they have two stages of when they're a newborn, one stage called the quiet stage, this is their deep sleep so they're going to be very deeply asleep, you're not going to be seeing movement you're not going to be hearing grunting. They're going to be really really asleep, and in fact if you try to wake them up when they're in this quiet stage of sleep. Top 5 things you need to know about newborn sleep

It may be very hard because they're just that deeply asleep. The second stage of sleep they have is what we call active sleep so this is a lighter stage, they will be moving at twitching, maybe they're kicking or grunting. They may even cry for several seconds here and there, but still technically be in an active stage asleep, so I find that's helpful to know because they may still have their eyes closed and be sleeping, but they're, you know they're moving around and you may think in the middle of the night, oh gosh they're awake, but if we can try to kind of pause before rushing over there may be times that if we didn't pause, we would accidentally wake them up.

So I think that's helpful to know about our newborns. Yeah, actually I didn't know that either. I've known you for how long and I didn't know that there were two different sleep, that they had so that's cool. Yay. All right, so the next one I would say is, remember that they have a very strong, what we call Moro reflex, or a startle reflex. So, this basically they feel kind of like they're in freefall. And so they will jerk, their body, their limbs will jerk, and if they're sleeping when that happens, It's probably going to wake them up. So swaddling is so, so helpful for sleep. You know we want to make sure that they're getting time out of the swaddle that they're getting, you know tummy time eventually that doesn't come right away but that does come eventually as you build that in anytime they're awake, we don't want them swaddled but if they are sleeping and we want them to continue sleeping swaddling is really really helpful to keep them from prematurely, waking themselves up, because of that reflex. The next thing I would say that I want to make sure you know about newborn sleep is that we can be setting a consistent wakeup time for them, which will help their day kind of start to make sense so their day is not going to be predictable by any means for several months. But if we run into this thing where we're not starting their day we're not exposing them to light until 1011 o'clock, maybe even noon, some days that just naturally is going to mean that bedtime is much much later, so I recommend trying to keep it within an hour range, every morning that you're starting their day waking them up, exposing to light, talking to them, doing their first fading of the day, and, and try to have an hour range so maybe that's sometime between seven and eight, maybe that's between eight and nine, or six to seven. But then that means any time before that our worker, if they're awake, we're still going to treat it like nighttime so we want to keep them in darkness, you can absolutely be responding and attentive to them, but we don't want to be super chatty like we may be during the day, we want to be low stimulation low key and that will help help their body as they mature to figure out what's day, and what's night. The fourth thing I want to talk about is to be mindful that their period of being awake during the day is short, so when we're talking about an itty bitty newborn who just came to Earth with us, it's gonna be like, 45 minutes max that they can be awake, and sometimes depending on how slow or fast they eat. That may be the entire time they're feeding, and then it's right back to sleep for their next snack, but as they get older as they get more efficient at eating, you know the eating is going to take up less and less time, but we still want to be mindful of about 45 to 60 minutes of awake time, so that they're not getting overtired, so they're not being overstimulated, and you know this is probably the main thing that I remember doing really well with my second is following those wake windows, I was kind of like clockwork with him, which is why I think naps went better for him, versus Ethan who I was just like, whatever, I don't know, I have no idea when or how much he nabbed I can't even remember at this point but that's the same here I think that wake windows, and then having that wake up time I know that we did that too and there were some days where guys I completely understand it's hard to wake them up when you're like exhausted yourself, and you're like, I have to get him up between six and seven every day, or whatever that timeframe is for you, and you're like buddies sleep be mean, but it really did, it was an investment in the future and future Kayla thanked past Kayla very much for doing that, oh my gosh I talk about that so much with my families when we work with them really whatever age that when we're trying to make changes or we're trying to work towards a goal, you are investing your sleep right now. Because if you're changing things you're not going to get the same amount of sleep that you usually are but you're investing and sacrificing your sleep now. You know, in order to get that better sleep for everyone down the road so it is definitely an investment of that current sleep. All right, the last thing I would recommend is just always being curious about your newborn sleep. So, so often I see it you know one I see that families will rush over and accidentally wake their child when they're really just in an active stage asleep so we always want to pause and be curious, but also sometimes we tend to like, we hear our child, starting to wake in the night and we rush straight to, you know what I would call the big guns so we rushed rushed straight over to rock in the back to sleep, or to feeding them back to sleep without first being curious of, is this something they need, or can they go back to sleep with less help can they go back to sleep if I just go replace the past see can they go back to sleep. If I rest a hand on their chest, you know, a heavy hand, or do they actually is this actually have a hunger waking. So I just recommend always be curious, always pause. Easier said than done because in the middle of the night, you're like, Okay, your brains just telling you do whatever you can, the fastest to get back to sleep. But by pausing and being curious that does set us up for the future to be in a better spot than if we just instinctively react to whatever's going to be the quickest, in the moment. So the last thing I want to mention here, you know after kind of talking about those five tips, I do want to make sure you're aware that I have a newborn sleep course that's online self paced, it's geared towards zero to 12 weeks so if maybe you're expecting or if you are in those first zero to 12 weeks, and you're struggling and you're just looking for some more guidance on how to work through applying some of these things on how you can be curious on how you can gradually learn to lay your newborn down awake. My course is a very low key, low pressure, gradual way to do that and to practice from the beginning so I highly recommend taking a look at that, if this is kind of the stage you're in, and you're struggling, and I will put a link to that in the show notes for you guys. Alright guys, and as always thank you so so much for listening to us and we look forward to talking to you again next week.

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